--On Tuesday, February 25, 2003 10:04 PM -0800 J C Lawrence <claw@kanga.nu>
wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 23:02:27 -0500
> Tom Neff <tneff@grassyhill.net> wrote:
>> --On Tuesday, February 25, 2003 7:20 PM -0800 J C Lawrence
>> <claw@kanga.nu> wrote:
>>> On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 22:06:16 -0500 Barry A Warsaw
>>> <bwarsaw@python.org> wrote:
>
>>> The difference is that those are your fault, not your software's
>>> fault.
>
>> That is, as they say, a distinction without a difference. A missed
>> legitimate email has no way of knowing whether it was missed as the
>> result of software miscalibration or a tired eye on the 1AM Inbox.
>
> True, objectively, but there is a significant subjective difference. In
> one way I had the opportunity to see the mail, and didn't, and the other
> way something hid it from me without my explicit per-message consent.
>
> Think like a control freak...
I always think like a control freak. :) A good spam filter doesn't write to
/dev/null, it reroutes to a holding pen. There, just like with a nonfiltered
approach, I have the opportunity to see it (now or later) if I want.
This sometimes happens when I order from a new merchant. These days what I
tend to do (unless I want to maintain an 'account' of some kind) is create a
temporary email alias, like E_030226@grassyhill.net, and use that for my
transaction. (This allows me to go through my aliases file every week and
delete old temp aliases, so that even if a merchant sells its database the
addy is useless for future spam.) So I make my purchase, carefully noting
that the paisley waffle iron is in stock :) - and also use a one-time
"virtual card number" from Citibank where possible - and wait for my emailed
confirmation of charge and shipping. Sometimes I don't see it right away,
and sometimes that's because the merchant sends confirms that Bayes-test a
bit spammy. So I just pop open the 'spamhold' folder in Mulberry, and bang
there the confirm is. I drag it to a holding folder called 'spamgood' which
is harvested once a minute by a cron job that takes each message, whitelists
it in the Bayes filter, and throws it over into my Inbox. Now I'm good with
that merchant for as long as I want to keep the alias around.
I just thought I'd give an example of a technique.
The other thing I do is periodically purge that 'spamhold' folder, but before
I do, I search for all messages sent *personally* to my one or two real-McCoy
addresses, and do a quick scan of the From field to see if anyone I know is
worth rescuing. Anything I see (a musician's tour dates for example) I drag
to Spamgood. Then I purge and reset the spamhold folder.
I also have a log (1 line per email) that I never purge, so if by chance
someone says to me "I sent you that powerpoint file three months ago" I can
check.
References:
|
|
